No Audio in Engage Videos

Hi Michael!

Are you able to recreate the issue in a new file with this same video? I'm not familiar with this, but perhaps it would be helpful for you to share the video file that you are having difficulty with and we can try to replicate.

Yes, I have recreated the issue. The issue first appeared at our offices in China. A team member sent us the video file, the Engage file, and the pptx file which he used to build the course for Presenter.

Once we received the files, I tried with all of the files he sent, then I created a new pptx from our base template, I created a new Engage interaction, and I even re-rendered the video and audio using our settings for the US (Our team members in China use different render settings due to format issues).

I inserted the Engage Interaction into the blank project pptx, and then published the whole thing. I had the same result.

The video plays just fine by itself in VLC media player and Windows Media Player. For some reason, the only time the audio drops out is after the project is published.

That is what led me to believe that it may be the original format of the footage. They shoot in PAL, while we shoot NTSC. It just seems that after rendering the footage to NTSC format would have fixed it, but no dice.

Here is the latest render of the file. I had to get permission before sending it.

The problem has been solved.
Here is what the issue was, and how to resolve it, in case anyone else runs into this in the future...

We shoot our videos in a studio. We write a script for voice over to go along with the video. The voice over audio is generally recorded and rendered in stereo. Then we import both the video clips and audio clips into our video editing software and render it all out as an mp4.

The team member that recorded this particular audio chose to record and render in mono. This works fine for playing the mp4 in media players, but apparently Articulate Studio doesn't have the ability to play back the audio if the recording was originally done in mono. 

It seems strange that the rendering through video editing software doesn't fix it, since it is a completely new file by the time that is finished, but that's how it happened.

If anyone else runs into this problem, just put your audio file into Audacity or some other audio editing software and render it in stereo. That will fix it.

Thanks for your help, Leslie.

Glad that you were able to get to the bottom of this and thank you for sharing your solution with the community :)